Monthly Archives: January 2008

As D. points out, today is the last day in January, and there won’t be another one until next year. Well, rabbit rabbit everyone.

I’m sorry updates have been so unsub­stan­tial. Recently my duties as a school-child have been taking up whole days, weeks even. That, and I’m currently in rehearsals for about eight differ­ent things, working three jobs, co-produc­ing a concert, writing a piano concerto… I don’t even want to list it all because it will only make me feel feckless. The more things I have going on, the less time I have to write about them (ah, that explains why my blog entries last semester were so dull!).

I think it says some­thing, there­fore, that the reason I feel called upon to write is that I taught my Mom to read this, so she is expect­ing new material. She has become very tech­no­log­i­cally adept, and can be spotted now and then listen­ing to recorded books on her tiny, tiny iPod.

I am about to step out the door for the first rehearsal of Play it by Ear. Then tomorrow is the first rehearsal of a little piece I wrote for Cameron Arens called Speed Trials. I haven’t rehearsed a new piece since Shy and Mighty got underway last Spring. First rehearsals can be terri­fy­ing, but I’m excited about these because they are with groups of friends.

Everyone should come hear New Music New Haven next Thursday, to hear Play it by Ear and a couple of other new pieces by my school chums. I’ll also be playing in Alvin Lucier’sFide­liotrio, in which the cello and viola slide very, very slowly between G sharp and B flat over the course of 12 minutes— twice. (And I play only the A between them.) I guar­an­tee that if you listen closely you will be completely riveted, or else fall asleep, which might not be totally beside the point.

In cele­bra­tion of having nothing better to do today, I converted my iTunes library and Last.fm profile to a composer-centric cata­logu­ing system (rather than the performer-centric one I’d used up until now). I’ve grad­u­ally come to the real­iza­tion that the iTunes ecosys­tem just isn’t designed to support track info for “clas­si­cal music”, where the “artist” and “composer” are differ­ent people. Even though iTunes does support the “composer” tag, it’s only useful for orga­ni­za­tion within iTunes, because no other programs recog­nize it.

In my re-orga­ni­za­tion, the name of the person or group most asso­ci­ated with the creation of the track goes into the “artist” field. For example, “Jean Sibelius” for Finlan­dia, not “Berlin Phil­har­monic”. For album-centric music, the primary creator can be the performer, not the composer: “Bill Evans” is the artist for a My Funny Valen­tine, even though Rodgers and Hart wrote the original song. Despite requir­ing me to make these judge­ment calls, I think the new way is more intu­itive. Also, my Last.fm profile will now tell me more about my listen­ing habits; instead of an incom­pre­hen­si­ble list of perform­ers and disem­bod­ied tracks, I’ll see a nice, clean stack of composers and pieces. My performer tags are now in the “comments” slot, and don’t get uploaded. A new year, a new profile.

Oh! This also gives me the oppor­tu­nity to recom­mend one of my favorite sites: Doug’s Apple­scripts for iTunes. Apple­scripts are tiny programs designed to automate repet­i­tive tasks; this is how I was able to re-tag 9,000 tracks without going through each one by hand (I don’t have that much free time). So, for instance, one Apple­script switched my artists to the “comments” field, then my composers to “artist”, and another one refor­mat­ted the composers to “First name Last name”. You can find a script to do pretty much anything you’d ever want, and they’re acces­si­ble from a menu right in iTunes— a huge time­saver for anyone with a big library.

I love Radio­head for many reasons. One of them is this video. The song they’re playing (The Smiths’s Head­mas­ter Ritual) is one of my favorites, and you can tell it’s one of theirs as well; I imagine them as timid English school­boys in 1985, clus­ter­ing around the hi-fi, listen­ing to Meat is Murder and thinking “That’s what I want to be doing with my life”.

Besides being really touching, it’s also just a great perfor­mance. There’s a “cover band” stigma in the rock world: the act of inter­pre­ta­tion garners little respect, while much more value is placed on orig­i­nal­ity (exactly the reverse of the current clas­si­cal-music paradigm). I think in the future we’ll see a gradual increase of rock musi­cians recre­at­ing the canon, with the original record­ing acting as the author­i­ta­tive version instead of a musical score. More perfor­mances like this one wouldn’t be bad.

In the past few months, I’ve finished three or four new pieces, and I had to think up names for all of them. I used not to put any effort into titles (here’s an example). At some point during college, I had a two-part epiphany. Part one was: would I want to read a book called Bildungsro­man, Op. 4? (OK, actually that sounds inter­est­ing, but not terribly evoca­tive). Part two was: I suddenly realized that many composers give their really great pieces really bad titles. Bad titles, espe­cially ones that sound vaguely new-age, make my spine crawl. And I can’t under­stand why composers, all in all a pretty smart bunch, are allowed to get away with them.

On a related note, the plural­ized-abstract-noun + number thing is just not working anymore. That’s a major cop-out. My friend Alex (who has some great titles, by the way) once made a list of all the plural-noun titles he could think of off the top of his head, and there were some­thing like 400 of them.

I find Sufjan Stevens’s para­graph-long song titles a bit self-conscious, though I like the general language of them.

So how do I think up titles? I like phrases and combi­na­tions of words that are easy to pronounce, and feel like some­thing I would say in conver­sa­tion. There’s some­thing prepos­sess­ing about a title that’s in regular, everyday English, rather than one that forces you to step back and regard it as Art.

Naming a piece is like how I imagine naming a fictional char­ac­ter would be; you can decide to make it really signif­i­cant and symbolic, or you can just choose some­thing that sounds more or less suitable. I keep a list of phrases I think would make good titles, some of which are prepos­ter­ous and will probably never find a comple­men­tary piece (example: Every­thing Seems Edible). I play around with differ­ent vari­a­tions on a title as I’m working on a piece. Usually the most stream­lined version ends up working best, and it’s often the one I thought of first.

All this goes to show that titles are less mean­ing­ful than you think (and than program notes would have you believe). People often ask me what Shy and Mighty means. The answer is “not much”. It’s just the first thing that popped into my head.